Alison Orton of UIUC-Chicago and I are seeking a commentator and panelists for a panel submission to the Midwest History Conference next June. Our current papers primarily focus on beer and ethnicity in the Midwest but we welcome submissions which investigate the social and cultural history of alcohol from any perspective.

Alison’s paper is about both cohesion and inter-ethnic strife among brewery workers in Chicago from 1890-1914. She focuses on workers who emigrated from Bohemia, Moravia, Lower Austria, and parts of Germany. My paper examines how German immigrants used beer to make citizenship claims, navigate the market revolution, as well as respond to adversarial temperance and nativist efforts in Chicago and Cincinnati during the 1850s.